Two really weird crime stories from the past few days.
1. Four bicyclists went missing in Oklahoma last week.
Later in the week, police pulled human remains out of a river.
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“We believe the men planned to commit some kind of criminal act when they left the resident on West 6th Street,” Prentice told reporters.
“That belief is based on information supplied by a witness who reports they were invited to go with the men to ‘hit a lick’ big enough for all of them,” he said, using slang for obtaining money illegally.
It is a shame that Big Don Westlake is dead, as this sounds like something out of a Parker novel.
2. The Mad Midnight Bomber What Bombed at Midnight was a cosplayer. And a sex offender.
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The victim, identified in court documents as NK, suffered serious injuries. He and his girlfriend, identified as SB, were members of the “Dagorhir” gaming community along with McCoy.
The game is described as “a live-action roleplaying (LARP) battle game” involving medieval costumes and mock combat with prop weapons.
McCoy approached SB over Discord and confessed his romantic feelings for her. She turned him down, reminding him she was dating NK. So McCoy built a homemade bomb, gift-wrapped it and dropped it off at NK’s doorstep, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland.
He researched how to build it, bought materials in cash from multiple stores to conceal his efforts, and ultimately built a package bomb that he placed inside a shipping box, which he drove to the victim’s house himself, according to prosecutors.
The bomber seems fairly clever. But not clever enough: they got DNA, they got location data from his cellphone, and they got video from a neighbor’s doorbell camera.
Kind of a weird crime, and sort of weird people. But people don’t realize that in todays world, you are never hidden, unless you are in some underground bunker, and then you have to get in and out of said bunker. There are literally cameras EVERYWHERE.
I can’t imagine the crime that one could commit that they could get away with, it the authorities really wanted to solve it. No matter how much they planned and thought, and waited, somehow, somewhere, something is usually going to trip them up. Often, it is their own lack of self restraint, and the fact that people often have the need to tell someone about their crime.
I am in the middle of reading the book by John Ross, Unintended Consequences, and that was one of the plot devices in the early stages of the book, so it came to mind. It reminds me of the old saying that two people can keep a secret, if one of them is dead.
A couple of years ago, we had two young women killed, seemingly unconnected, until a third young lady was picked up by the killer, and managed to escape, and gave the police a description of his van, and him. He had been on their radar, but they didn’t have enough to get a warrant and search his van, or they would have found handcuffs, an eye bolt in the floor, rope, a few syringes, and some quick acting drug to knock out the victim, in a box in the van.
He had accosted a woman jogger, who fought him and he shot her twice in the head and left her dead. A few months, he kidnapped a woman working alone at a gas station with no cameras, on the night shift, and raped and murdered her, getting a cousin to help bury the body, with the cousin getting time in jail, but the guy moved the body. Then the murder picked up a 16 year old walking home in the middle of the night from a slumber party, but when she saw him going the wrong way instead of the ride home he promised, she jumped out of the moving car, and ran and got to a house with the lights on. At that point, it was mostly over save for the foot work.
Michigan does not have the death penalty, so he got life with no parole, but sometimes, like if the crime is on federal land, they can go for the death penalty.
I know that there have always been murderers like this, but it seems that there are more and more of them now than when I was young. It is as if life has become cheaper to people, and it takes more to make some of them feel alive or something. We live in very wicked times.